While we’re on, I want to say that lots of people have been kind enough to write thoughtful and positive reviews of the book on Amazon UK and on Goodreads so far – thank you to everyone who did that! And if you want to join them, please be my guest.

Sight & Sound also ran a very nice review of the book in its February 2018 issue: check it out! David Thompson wrote the piece and here are some of the things he said about the book:

highly sympathetic and well researched book … a welcome and long overdue addition to the BFI Film Classics series … particularly valuable in detailing the origins of the film, how it came to be made at all and the striking personalities involved …

Hutchinson takes us through this narrative in unerring detail, underlining Pabst’s significant departures from the original and demonstrating how Wedekind’s palindromic structure is compressed but also heightened through the film’s imagery …

As Hutchinson adroitly points out, it pictures “female sexuality not as moral weakness but as an eruption of pleasure”. She notes that everything turns constantly on how much men’s desire for Lulu is transformed into hate, and how far money potentially poisons all the relationships throughout …

As this book makes very clear, rarely has the blurring of a screen role and real life been so fruitful for a creator and so tantalising for the audience.

“Unerring detail”, eh? Don’t let that put you off. Stick out the “unerring detail” and soon enough you’ll get to that “eruption of pleasure”, I promise.